Rickshaw wallah

I'm sorry about the lack of updates - my posting frequency is way down at the moment, but hey, I never said it was a daily blog, did I? I did? Oh. Well it isn't, it's an erratic blog that aims for daily posts and will settle for two or three a week...

So anyway, here's a photo I took from the taxi on the way into Calcutta from the airport, during my very first half hour in India. This was back in September 1992, on the final leg of my round-the-world trip. I'd been travelling already for about six months and so it wasn't quite the shock to the system that it might have been - but even so, the contrast with South-East Asia was pretty stark. Indonesia is a poor, crowded third world country, but there's poor and crowded and then there's Calcutta. I'm reading Song of Kali by Dan Simmons at the moment, he does a pretty good job of capturing the atmosphere of the place.

Details: Minolta X-500, 50mm lens, exposure not recorded. Calcutta, September 1992. Placemark (approximate).